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Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices in small-scale farming

Climate change is already having a huge impact on agriculture and food security, due to increased prevalence of extreme weather events and the increased unpredictability of weather patterns. These affect the productivity of farming systems and, as a further consequence, create income insecurities for farmers. Adaptation to climate change and climate change mitigation (lower emission intensities per output unit) thus are one of the topmost priorities of FAO's work. Because, in order to achieve food security and agricultural development goals with a growing world population, adaptation to climate change and lower emission intensities per output will be necessary.

Climate change is a major issue and is currently addressed on the highest political levels, in order to reach an international binding agreement in the context of the COP21 (Conference of Parties) in Paris.

Smallholder farmers in developing countries and pastoralists in particular are being hard hit by these changes of climatic conditions. Many small-scale producers are already coping with a degraded natural resource base. They often lack knowledge about potential options for adapting their production systems and have limited assets and risk-taking capacity to access and use technologies and financial services.

Smallholder farmers can make a major contribution to address climate change. By its work, FAO is highlighting the role of small-scale farmers for coping with climate change and its impacts on agriculture. An ecosystem approach in agriculture can help to deal with the impacts of climate change and there are many ways to overcome barriers in the adoption of CSA.

The TECA platform highlights the role of small-scale practices and technologies for Climate-Smart Agriculture and is calling for members to share their practices dealing with CSA. Which practices do you apply to adapt to and/or mitigate climate change impacts? We would be happy to share with you already exisiting TECA practices and invite you to share experiences, practices and technologies that help to tackle climate change in small-scale agriculture.

Here are some useful links to TECA practices, which help to tackle climate change by Climate-smart agriculture.

Comments

Thank you Kilian. The sudden and somewhat abrupt withdrawal of the United States from COP21 and the Paris deal has raised an eyebrow here or there this week. While smallholder farmers like many of us are usually market trend followers instead of forceful economic drivers, we do rely at times on the big players whether in terms of agricultural initiatives till protecting ourselves against climate change and extreme weather events. Even though there is nothing much to be gained from tackling climate change, for the sake of our global community we thank the Food and Agriculture Organisation as well as this TECA platform in staying committed to addressing climate change even in the smallest ways possible.

As a humanistic volunteer myself too, I have noticed how during the first decade with the turn of the century, there has been several major natural catastrophes that were downright scary so to say the least. Global warming is real, and it is only in recent years such as with the Paris agreement as well as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that we have begun to see more improvements in the immediate as well as longer term. We count our blessings, and we hope that by being mindful of the damage that our homo sapien civilisation via practices such as agriculture can do to our ecosystem, we can strive on and not give up on the prospects of leaving a safe, green and clean world for our many future generations to come. Thanks once again in this brilliant post by Kilian!